Quotes from Gaston Bachelard

For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?

A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

Happy is the man who knows or even the man who remembers those silent vigils where silence itself was the sign of the communion of souls!

We understand nature by resisting it.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams.

It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.

All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.

The reverie would not last if it were not nourished by the images of the sweetness of living, by the illusions of happiness.

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie.

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?

Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.